GSmartControl is a new tool that has a graphical user interface for smartctl (from Smartmontools, which is a tool forquerying and controlling SMART (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and ReportingTechnology) data on modern hard disk drives. It allows you to inspect thedrive's SMART data to determine its health, as well as run various tests onit.

Ability to load smartctl output as a "virtual" device, which acts just like a real (read-only) device.

Works on most smartctl-supported operating systems.

Extensive help information.

What is SMART?

Short answer: SMART is a technology which provides hard disk drives withmethods to predict certain kinds of failures with certain chance of success.

Long answer: read below.

Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology, or SMART, is amonitoring system for hard drives to detect and report various indicators ofreliability, in the hope of anticipating failures. It is implemented insidethe drives SMART provides several ways of monitoring hard drive health. Itmay provide information about general health, various drive attributes (forexample, number of unreadable sectors), error logs, and so on. It may alsoprovide ways to instruct the drive to run various self-tests, which may reportvaluable information. It may even automatically scan the disk surface in whenthe drive is idle, and repair the defects, reallocating the data to more safeareas.

While having SMART sounds really good, there are some nuances to consider. Oneof the commond pitfalls is that it may create a false sense of security. Thatis, a perfectly good SMART data is NOT an indication that the drive won't failthe next minute. The reverse is also true - some drives may function perfectlyeven with not-so-good-looking SMART data. However, as studies indicate, givena large population of drives, some SMART attributes may reliably predictdrive failures within up to two months.

Another common mistake is to assume that the attribute values are the realphysical values, as experienced by the drive. As manufacturers do notnecessarily agree on precise attribute definitions and measurement units, theexact meaning of the attributes may vary greatly across different drivemodels.

At present SMART is implemented individually by manufacturers, and while someaspects are standardized for compatibility, others are not. In fact, mostmanufacturers refer the users to their own health monitoring utilities, andadvice against taking SMART data seriously. Nevertheless, SMART may prove aneffective measure against data loss.

Yet another issue is that quite often the drives have bugs which preventcorrect SMART usage. This is usually due to buggy firmware, or themanufacturer ignoring the standard. Luckily, smartmontools usually detectsthese bugs and works around them.